An experiment was conducted to study the effects of stimulus patterning upon reaction time (RT) performance and palmar skin conductance (PSC) of one Ss over a period of 10 consecutive days. The main findings were that: PSC was significantly more variable with an irregular signal pattern than with a regular one, RTs were significantly faster with the regular pattern, there was a non-significant trend in which high PSC values were associated with fast RTs and low PSC values with slow RTs. The results were discussed in terms of wider variations in arousal produced by irregularly occurring signals and greater learning with regular signals.
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